Drawing exhibit in Barnstable

"I prefer drawing to talking," Le Corbusier, the famous architect, once said. "Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies." And it's true: There's something about drawing that allows for a greater chance of exploration and risk, for an unexpected truth you don't always find in more finished work.

"I prefer drawing to talking," Le Corbusier, the famous architect, once said. "Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies." And it's true: There's something about drawing that allows for a greater chance of exploration and risk, for an unexpected truth you don't always find in more finished work.

I love drawing for that reason, and "Making Marks, Marking Time: Contemporary Drawings," a showcase of 11 Cape artists at the Higgins Art Gallery curated with diligent range and acumen by director Betty Fuller, gives us plenty of those moments.

With elements of realism, abstraction, installation and conceptualism, there's memorable work here from all participants. There is a lively mix of disparate styles that moves off the page and away from traditional media and materials to include elements of photography and sculpture, but with enough cohesion of serious intent to collectively satisfy purists and avants alike.

Donald Beal's figure drawings greet you as you enter the gallery, and it's immediately clear the mass in his paintings comes from the weight of his drawing. He displays a marvelous facility for convincingly articulating a dimensional figure in a credible space. It's the most traditional work here, but there's nothing anachronistic about it, with Beal bringing fresh vitality to a old standard.

Suzanne Archibald's abstractions of line that has been layered and looped into a nest of forms are intimate allusions to botanical fecundity, and currents of wind and water over the landscape. Meanwhile, Shirley Mossman Nisbet's large abstract scrawls — related to a medical scare the artist went through - are full of convulsive line and percussive energy that threatens to burst off the paper. Their painful origin is mitigated by a cathartic defiance of marking time on paper.

Serious about not taking things too seriously, Bailey Bob Bailey recontexturalizes utilitarian material, like padded foil and aluminum tape, to playfully fashion images of his heroes — like Abraham Lincoln — onto freestanding floor sculptures that look like inverted envelopes or bags that debunk the whole notion of the "precious art object." That comes more in the form of early work from Breon Dunigan: small Hydrocal panels with bone-like surfaces inscribed with a singular image. They're as delicate as they are strong, curious mementos that anticipate her fascination with verbs and vessels.

For Selina Trieff and Robert Henry, former Hans Hofmann students, drawing is at the core of their practice, and the dozen works here from each constitutes a high point. The artists are marvelously paired side by side, and I spent a good amount of time scanning the configuration of moments from each: Trieff's pantomime of figures dressed in black, and hewn with an unrelenting Sharpie or embellished with gold leaf; and Henry's figurative gallery of tenderness, dry humor and psychological duress scribed at times with a line of extraordinary suppleness.

Mark Adams' ink drawings of swimmers and bathers, on mylar, are also wonderful — as fresh as the water they bathe in. Adams hits high notes with an image of a swimmer in tandem with a shark, and "Swimming Head," a large drawing with a crescendo of choppy water and a frail head balanced at the top. They're slightly surreal, cartoonish, and as oddly fraught as they are funny.

Jackie Reeves, proving that her recent fine show at the Cotuit Center for the Arts was no fluke, also exhibits ink drawings on mylar — life-size, gauzy images of her children marked out in dense, tremulous black pools of wash and splatters. "Drawing," Reeves says, "is where things are most authentic for me. It's only for me."